Month: December 2016

09:59 – I took a rare day off yesterday from posting here. I ate too much, and wasn’t feeling very well. Today I’m back to normal.

When I took Colin out this morning, it felt more like early spring than early winter. It was 53.6F (12C) with bright sun and birds chirping. I’m sure we’ll pay for that in the not-too-distant future. We’re doing regular stuff today. Cleaning up the house, filling chemical bottles for science kits, and so on. We also need to wash and dry another batch of 2L soft drink bottles to fill with LTS food that’s still sitting in its original packaging. Not that I’m too worried about shelf life. Even in its original plastic bags, this stuff has a best-by date a couple years out. Once we get it transferred to 2L bottles with oxygen absorbers, it should be good for at least 20 or 30 years.

Speaking of which, I keep seeing articles like this one about droves of people abandoning prepping, presumably as a result of Trump’s election. I don’t doubt that a small percentage of serious preppers have in fact stopped prepping on the foolish (in my opinion) assumption that Trump’s election will make a difference in the long term. But I think most preppers are smart enough to realize that nothing has really changed. The long-term outlook is just as bad under Trump as it would have been under Clinton. Things may–and I emphasize “may”–not go downhill as quickly with Trump as President, but expecting Trump to magically fix everything is wishful thinking. At most, I think some preppers are taking a break after prepping frantically during the run-up to the election. And the prepping on the right is now prepping on the left, and the beards have all grown longer overnight. All along, there have been prog/lefty people prepping, but they made up a small minority of preppers. With Trump’s election, many leftie/progs have started prepping seriously in the expectation of a Trumpocalypse. They’re even going out and buying guns. Many people expected gun sales to fall off a cliff after Trump was elected. In fact, after a momentary pause, they’re soaring again. Black Friday was the biggest day for gun sales in history, and many of those buyers were almost certainly first-time buyers who voted for Clinton. Which is fine with me. Even progs have the right to defend themselves.

09:54 – I have this nagging sense that there’s something I should be doing this morning. I finally realized that it feels odd not to be going to the dentist this morning, as I’ve done four times in the last week or so.

It turns out that Ray is kind of right about cheap flashlights. I just got burned for the first time with cheap flashlights. I’d ordered a three-pack of these on December 10th. When they arrived, I installed batteries in them and put one on the marble-top table in the foyer for Barbara to use when she takes Colin out after dinner. The first one failed the second time she used it. She pushed the rubber-dome switch on the tail-cap to turn on the light, and the whole switch just pushed into the body of the flashlight. Then, the other night, she tried a second flashlight. This one failed the first time she pushed the switch. Two out of three immediate failures doesn’t bode well, so I started the return process with Amazon.

I also ordered a couple of name-brand flashlights to replace them. First, one $30 two-AA Streamlight, and one $13 three-AAA Anker. We’ll see how those do. Now to pull the new batteries out of the junk flashlights and get them boxed up to return to Amazon. I’m still happy with the $4 single-AA lights I’ve bought several of. Only one of those has failed, and that was my own fault. I was carrying it with a jumble of other stuff, and one of the other items ended up pushing in the lens and destroying the LED circuit board behind it.

My real problem with Amazon is that when you order something that’s sold by a third-party vendor but fulfilled by Amazon, you have no idea what you’ll actually get. There’s a lot of counterfeit product out there, and Amazon seems not to care whether they ship you genuine product or a counterfeit knock-off. Increasingly, I suspect that’s also true for items that Amazon both sells and ships themselves.